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The Apocalypse Served Straight Up

WHEN the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Roger Corman with an honorary award in 2009, the citation didn’t mention the more than 50 films he directed. Instead the Academy praised him for “his rich engendering of films and filmmakers” — a phrase that distractingly evokes a champion racehorse in retirement but evidently refers to Mr. Corman’s stunning track record as a producer.

The Internet Movie Database lists 394 projects in which Mr. Corman participated as a production executive, from “Highway Dragnet” in 1954 to “Sharktopus,” a 2010 effort for the Syfy cable channel that, in the venerable Corman tradition, has attracted cult interest. (It will be released on DVD in March.) The vast majority of these movies were ultra-low-budget productions, many made in a matter of a few days with casts and crews willing to accept tiny checks and work long hours in exchange for experience and an entrée into the industry.

Among the graduates of what has come to be known as the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking are the directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, the actors Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, the producers Jon Davison and Gale Anne Hurd, the writers Robert Towne and John Sayles and countless others. “Do a good job on this picture,” Mr. Corman liked to say, “and your reward will be that you’ll never have to work for me again.”

But Mr. Corman, who turns 85 this year, is more than a shrewd businessman with a keen eye for new talent. His best films as a director express a genuine sensibility: a somber, apocalyptic vision belied by some of the more lurid titles in his filmography. The director of “Teenage Caveman” (1958) and “The Last Woman on Earth” (1960) was fascinated by the prospect of end times, of civilizations collapsing and worlds imploding.

In Mr. Corman’s movies, the deluge is always just around the corner, and his young protagonists — projections of the teenage public that supported his work at drive-ins and double-features — are either the victims of social decadence (all of those ripe young women, held in the trembling grip of an aging Vincent Price in Mr. Corman’s series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations) or its enthusiastic harbingers (the nihilistic antiheroes of his gangster pictures, the anarchist bikers of “The Wild Angels”).

The independent label Shout! Factory has been issuing some of the better-known Corman productions over the last year (including “Piranha,” Joe Dante’s subversive 1978 response to “Jaws”). Now Shout! has turned to Corman the director with a nifty two-disc set, “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics Triple Feature,” that includes excellent transfers of three early and rare Corman features and trailers for some 25 more. Filmmaking doesn’t get much more elemental than this, yet the work is always entertaining and at times startlingly effective.

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Poster for “Not of This Earth.”Credit
Shout! Factory/New Horizons

“Attack of the Crab Monsters” and “Not of This Earth” opened as a double feature on Feb. 10, 1957, distributed by the Poverty Row studio Allied Artists. They make a surprising contrast: “Crab Monsters” is one of the few Corman films that seem outright campy, with its awkward structure, wavering tone and cheesy special effects; but “Not of This Earth” is tightly constructed, crisply filmed and genuinely creepy.

It’s mainly a question of focus: “Crab Monsters” imagines a diverse group of nuclear scientists (youngsters who look good in bathing suits, oldsters with slippery foreign accents) investigating the mysterious disappearance of a group of colleagues from an island test site. (Spoiler alert: a clue to their fate is contained in the title.) The characters are indistinct, the story line vague, the rhythms erratic, the creatures more crabby than monstrous. It’s a little film trying to look big, and falling disastrously (if divertingly) short.

“Not of This Earth,” though, represents a thoughtful alignment of resources and ambitions. The screenplay, by two of Mr. Corman’s regular collaborators, Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna, generates suspense by shifting between the points of view of the two main characters, a middle-aged gentleman (Paul Birch) with a mysterious blood disease, and a pretty young nurse (Beverly Garland) whose job it is to replace his plasma daily.

The set-up is essentially that of the Poe films to come (a creepy adult authority figure holes up in an old house with a sexy but vulnerable young dish), and by the time Mr. Corman teases out the back story (the gentleman is an emissary from a dying planet, looking for a fresh source of corpuscles) the emotional dynamics of the situation have already taken hold. (Mr. Corman liked the script so much that he produced two remakes of it, in 1988 and 1995.)

“War of the Satellites” (1958) attempts Kubrickian themes on a Bowery Boys budget. As humans prepare to leave their planet, an advanced alien race sends down an agent to replace the mild-mannered scientist (Richard Devon) in charge of the space project. Once again, rebellious youth saves the day, as the professor’s assistant (the irrepressible Dick Miller, in one of his 22 appearances in Corman-directed films) sees through the deception and takes matters into his own hands.

What differentiates Mr. Corman from more dedicated schlockmeisters like William Castle and Jess Franco is his almost unshakable sobriety. He seldom falls back on making fun of his material, preferring instead to play by the rules and with a straight face.

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Poster for Attack of the Crab Monsters.Credit
Shout! Factory/New Horizons

In “War of the Satellites,” a 32-year-old Mr. Corman turns up in an extended cameo as a ground control officer at an American rocket base. Staring straight ahead at a nonexistent bank of monitors, Mr. Corman does his best to pretend he’s manning the latest NASA equipment, rather than sitting behind a table on a rickety, two-sided set. His steady, serious bearing suggests his ethic as a filmmaker: he’s going to guide his leaky little ship through the parlous night, calmly solving problems as they arise, deftly steering clear of plot holes and absurdities until he gets his vessel safely home.

LET ME IN Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield”) directed this remake of the lyrical Swedish vampire film “Let the Right One In,” with Kodi Smit-McPhee as an ostracized boy who finds friendship with a mysterious neighbor (Chloë Grace Moretz). “The emotional tone is more American emo than Nordic melancholy,” A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in September.(Anchor Bay Entertainment, Blu-ray $39.99, DVD $29.98, R)

CONVICTION A working-class woman (Hilary Swank) puts herself through law school in an effort to free her wrongfully convicted brother (Sam Rockwell) from prison. With Melissa Leo, Juliette Lewis and Minnie Driver. “The emotions at work in a tale that moves from tragic cruelty through heroic patience toward ultimate triumph are so clear and obvious that dramatizing them almost seems redundant,” Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in October.(Fox Searchlight, Blu-ray $39.99, DVD $29.99, R)

THE TILLMAN STORY Josh Brolin narrates the tale of Pat Tillman, a professional football player who died in a so-called friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. Amir Bar-Lev directed. “This devastating film persuasively portrays” Tillman’s family “as finer, more morally sturdy people than the cynical chain of command that lied to them and used their son as a propaganda tool,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in August.(Sony Pictures, Blu-ray $30.95, DVD $24.96, R)

NEVER LET ME GO Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley attend an English boarding school where not everything is as it seems. Mark Romanek directed from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. “One of the pleasures of ‘Never Let Me Go,’ on the page and on screen, comes from the detective work the story requires,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times in September.(Fox Searchlight, Blu-ray $39.99, DVD $29.99, R)

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP The Chinese director Zhang Yimou (“Hero”) offers a remake of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 black comedy of wayward revenge, “Blood Simple.” “By working through the self-conscious genre imitation that was something of a novelty in ‘Blood Simple,’ Mr. Zhang uncovers the primal, mythic intensity of the story and also changes the tone of its essential nihilism,” Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in September.(Sony Pictures Classics, Blu-ray $38.96, DVD $28.95, R)

A version of this article appears in print on January 30, 2011, on page AR13 of the New York edition with the headline: The Apocalypse Served Straight Up. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe